Cactus Game Design Message Boards

IMO soul drought in constructed has been solved already by printing so many good soul gen cards and by speed being so prevalent. I would wager that if soul drought is anything but an extreme outlier between two players both of their decks are subpar; the droughting player's deck is too slow and the other player's deck doesn't have enough soul gen.

I'm not sure if this is the best place to mention this (as it would probably fit better in the Gameplay Variations section) but since you brought up Soul Drought and your suggested removing Lost Souls. I was talking to a friend of mine and the idea of seeing what the game would look like without Lost Souls, Sites and Dominants would play like.

The deckbuilding rules were the same except no Lost Souls, no Sites and no Dominants, T1 decks would be 50 cards, T2 would be 100 cards and still balanced good and evil. And the only rule change is you can always rescue a Lost Soul. And it really gets interesting in Multiplayer, where when you attack each opponent in succession (in turn order) has a chance to block you, so you might have to fight through three people in a four person game to make a Successful Rescue.

I don't know how this would play out, but it might be interesting to try.

I think if I were designing this I would make the multiplayer more like Teams - when you attack, one opponent decides to block. Three wins in a row is... difficult, to say the least. This way it has some of the same idea without requiring three battlewinners to get through, with the added benefit of taking away the current problem of everyone ganging up on one person to break their defense and other people never getting attacked all game.

IMO soul drought in constructed has been solved already by printing so many good soul gen cards and by speed being so prevalent. I would wager that if soul drought is anything but an extreme outlier between two players both of their decks are subpar; the droughting player's deck is too slow and the other player's deck doesn't have enough soul gen.

This is my feeling as well. There have been lots of great soul gen cards printed in the last two sets, with Ends and Lawless standing out as two that can go in almost if not every deck.

IMO stands for In my opinion.

There are SEVERAL more powerful Lost Soul generation cards coming this year. Maybe some of the best "soul gen" the game has ever known.

A similar concept to Soul Drought in other card games is Mana Drought or Mana Screw. A fair few other card games require you to play smaller cards that give you a sort of in-game currency that you spend in order to play and use other cards- Mana in Magic, where the term Mana Screw comes from; Energy in Pokémon; Lessons in Harry Potter; and Friends in My Little Pony.

One card game solved Mana Drought elegantly: Force of Will. Cards in Force of Will can only be played by expending Will, which is produced primarily by Magic Stones. Instead of drawing Magic Stones from the deck, a second deck, aptly called the Magic Stone deck, is placed alongside your Main Deck. Under normal circumstances, you can add a Magic Stone from the top of your Magic Stone Deck to your play area in addition to drawing a card from you Main Deck.

To apply the same concept to Redemption, you simply make that second draw compulsory.
No need to change the deck building rules of Redemption at all. All you have to do is remove the Lost Souls from the main deck. Each turn, in addition to drawing three from the main deck, a player must play the top card of their Lost Soul Deck to their Land of Bondage. Cards that return Souls to the deck simply return them to the Lost Soul Deck. Soul Gen abilities pull Souls from this deck instead of the main one. The game functions in exactly the same way as it did, but now Soul Drought does not exist. You get a chance to rescue virtually every single turn.


This used to be necessary, but after Early/Persecuted Church came to town, Soul Generation became a real thing. It's now part of your skill as a player to incorporate it into your deck and decide how much you need. Soul Drought does stink, but it's not such a huge problem that we need to reshape the game to solve it.